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Review

Vanquish Demo reviewBy Cozmic

Sometimes all you have to go on for a game are trailers, and then you
end up spending $60 (or, god forbid, euros, making everything even more
expensive) on something that looked really cool and turned out to be
full of infuriating little things. This is why demos are great! They
let you try out a game for your own and decide if all those things a
critic says bothers him or likes are as annoying as they say. Or they
will carefully hide all of that stuff by only showing you a very select
part of a game, but that is what marketing is all about.
Vanquish, for those who do not know, is a third person cover-based shooter
starring an American space marine in heavy armor fighting Russians and
it also has slow-motion effects. Sounds incredibly original, right?
Actually, Vanquish stops feeling like generic cover-based shooter #3586
(or might it be 87?) right off the bat. The team behind Vanquish is
Platinum Games, the studio that brought you Bayonetta earlier this year.
To top it off, the main man behind Vanquish is Shinji Mikami, whose
main claim to fame is being the man behind the Resident Evil series.
So when a Japanese team known for insane action take on something like
a third-person shooter, crazy things happen. Like the fact that Sam
Gideon, Vanquish's main character, has rockets on his armor. No, this
is not Tribes, and there is in fact no way to actually leave the ground
or navigate things heightwise except to clamber over them like in most
other cover-shooters. However, sprinting is for wussies when you can
rocketboost around (and actually turn, might I add!) only to give someone
a swift kick to the face. Vanquish is not slow and methodical like Gears
of War, Vanquish is completely nuts, and I say that in a good way. The
animation is fluid and the design is “Japan does robots”
in the really good way. Instead of carrying several weapons, Sam's weapon
simply morphs to replicate other weapons, and the effect is pretty cool.
The Vanquish demo lets you play one of the missions on “casual
auto” or normal difficulty, and there is also a tutorial to make
you acquainted with the various controls and Vanquish's boost meter.
The boost meter allows you to either boost around the level for a bit
or evade attacks and activate slow-motion, allowing you to see enemy
weakspots and take your time in aiming. The slow-mo also activates when
you are low on health, giving you time to react and run away, find cover
or just shoot whoever is killing you in the face. This is all well and
good, and during my playthrough of the level on normal I noticed that
simply because Vanquish gives you all these new fun ways to shoot stuff
(boost and shoot stuff, it's awesome!) it doesn't necessarily mean that
using cover is completely unnecessary. Combat was quick and fast-paced,
and the weapons are quite fun.
There was a giant robot I could steal and shoot missiles with after
killing the previous driver, something I was not expecting from the
tutorials. There were some really hard-killed enormous dudes who required
me to shoot them in the head, something that proved difficult because
Vanquish moves much quicker than, say, Gears of War and aiming is still
quite tricky with an analog stick. The “casual auto” difficulty
somewhat remedies this by locking on to specific targets in a way that
does not take away the need to aim entirely but also makes for an easier
experience when it comes to shooting moving targets. This is also where
the slo-mo shows some problems. To activate slow-motion you have to
evade and then aim, but I always did the mistake of taking aim and then
trying to activate it, resulting in my standing outside cover and moving
far too slowly while trying to get in a few well-placed hits.
Things got worse when I faced the giant boss, which had the habit of
destroying most of the cover and during my first attempt to beat it
I also ran out of ammo. Then the fact that the game activated slo-mo
when the enemy damaged me enough meant that I had to wait for the boost-meter
to fill up to full until I could boost away from instant kill attacks,
something that did not sit quite right with me. Summary: that boss is
surprisingly hard for a demo. It should be noted that your boost meter
also drains fully whenever you perform a melee attack, which means you
can't melee through a horde of enemies either. All in all, Vanquish
feels like a solid, fun and original game, but there are these tiny
peeves that I felt in the demo (like the fact that your ammo counter
is simply a small bar under your gun, which takes some getting used
to) or the boost meter draing to epmty whenever you get damaged enough,
that did not entirely sell me on the game as much as Vanquish should
have. But as a 700 MB download for the PS3 and Xbox, it is definitely
worth checking out to decide whether you should start anticipating Vanquish's
October 19th release(Octiber 22nd in Europe).